New York City adopts tough jobless-discrimination law

View full size New York City lawmakers passed the nation's most far-reaching measure Wednesday to protect out-of-work job applicants from discrimination, allowing job-seekers to sue if they believe they have been turned away because they're unemployed.Associated Press file

NEW YORK -- New York City lawmakers passed the
nation's most far-reaching measure Wednesday to protect out-of-work job
applicants from discrimination, allowing job-seekers to sue if they
believe they have been turned away because they're unemployed.

City
Council members overrode a mayoral veto of the measure, making the city
the fourth place in the country with some form of legislation against
discriminating against unemployed job-seekers. The new law takes effect
in three months.

While the other measures ban help-wanted ads that
say applicants must be employed, the New York City law goes further by
letting rejected applicants take employers to court and get damages.

"We
cannot and will not allow New Yorkers who are qualified and ready to
work and looking to work to have the door of opportunity slammed in
their faces," City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said.

It felt
like that to Joe Capone as he looked for work after a tough break more
than three years ago: He left his information technology support job in
late 2009 for a better-paying offer that then got rescinded.

At
one point, he said, a recruiter told him to fudge his resume to say he'd
been working because, otherwise, he'd never get a response. He didn't
follow the advice and eventually found a job in December 2011.

But it still bothers Capone that unemployment may be holding other job-seekers back.

"It's something that's totally out of their control, especially in certain fields," said Capone, 46, who lives in the city.

Unemployment-discrimination
laws have been floated around the country in recent years. President
Barack Obama proposed one in 2011, and New Jersey, Oregon, and
Washington, D.C., have passed them. New Jersey, which enacted the first
such measure in 2011, has cited at least one company for an ad that
excluded jobless applicants, its state Labor Department says.

Unemployed
job-hunters and their advocates say it's illogical and unfair to be
required to have a job to get a job, particularly after years of high
unemployment and layoffs. Nationally, more than 1 in 3 unemployed
workers has been looking for at least six months, the federal Bureau of
Labor Statistics says.

But businesses and Mayor Michael Bloomberg
predict the unemployment-discrimination measure will lead to baseless
lawsuits from disgruntled applicants. They say lawmakers shouldn't try
to dictate how hiring choices get made, and Bloomberg has suggested it
may well be reasonable to take someone's joblessness into account.

Unlike
race, religion, gender and other characteristics targeted by
anti-discrimination laws, "the circumstances surrounding a person's
unemployment status may, in certain situations, be relevant to employers
when selecting qualified employees," the billionaire mayor, who founded
and ran a financial-information firm before going into politics, said
in his veto message last month.

Bloomberg didn't elaborate. But
experts say hiring managers may think -- however unfairly -- that
unemployed applicants aren't top performers or that they'll take an
offer out of desperation and then leave if something better comes up.

If
an applicant hasn't been working for a couple of years, companies might
worry that his or her skills are rusty, said Kathryn Wylde, president
of the Partnership for New York City, an influential business group.

Industries
are being so fundamentally changed by technology and globalization that
"the longer the gap, the further (applicants) are from what's happening
on the cutting edge of their field," she said.

An October 2011
search of New York City-based job listings found more than a dozen that
explicitly required candidates to be employed, according to Manhattan
Borough President Scott Stringer's office. A broader review that year by
the National Employment Law Project found 150 ads that were restricted
to or aimed at people currently working.

Last fall, California
Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed an unemployment-discrimination measure,
indicating he wasn't happy with changes made to it. At least 15 other
states that have considered the idea haven't acted on it.

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